Outliers: The Story of Success (Hardcover)

by Malcolm Gladwell (Author)

Textbook Details
* Hardcover: 320 pages
* Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (November 18, 2008)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0316017922
* ISBN-13: 978-0316017923
* Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
* Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds

Textbook Description
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Outliers: The Story of Success Review
I found Outliers a very enjoyable read. It’s central idea is conventional wisdom: There is no such thing as a self-made man. Everyone benefits from or is hurt by the place and time they were born. But the examples that Mr. Gladwell finds to illuminate this point are interesting. Children benefit immensely from the month they were born in when it comes to organized sports and school (the reason is relative age). Korean Air flights kept crashing in the 1990s because Koreans aren’t forceful enough in dealing with their superiors. There is a surfeit of examples in this book but they are all interesting. This book is for someone who prefers “fun” reads to more challenging materials.

Well written and researched. Malcolm Gladwell examines why certain statistical portions of the population (outliers) achieve or do not achieve success. For instance, he explains why the people of a small town in New York have long lives and low crime despite greasy foods, smoking and alcohol consumption. He also states the obvious of why people, like Bill Gates, achieve their success, namely the time of which they were born and the over 10,000 hours of practice. A good read for anyone looking beyond the fallacies of dumb luck, talent or education alone.

This book does not live up to the standard set in Blink and Tipping Point. While I enjoy reading Gladwell, I was disappointed with Outliers. It is a short book with a few good stories and some little “truth gems” sprinkled throughout, but other authors have done better work on the same subject. In particular, I would recommend Colvin’s “Talent is Overated” for a more in depth treatment of “Outliers” or people who have become successful. Gladwell focuses more on the element of luck and opportunity, see the chapter on his own family in particular, while skimming over the other factors like hard work, deliberate practice, coaching and mentoring that play at least an equal role in anyone’s success. It is an interesting read, but probably better to break it up and publish the separate chapters in the New Yorker.

Outliers is an interesting, but ultimately unimportant book. Serious readers have already pointed out the selective use of cases and the generally unemperical approach to what is vaguely described as research. Readers seriously interested in the subject of this book would do well to acquaint themselves with research methods and the importance of differentiating between anecdotal evidence and more scholarly approaches to the development of a fundamental thesis. Lively discussions at book clubs are likely (and useful) but generalizing from a few case studies provides little of value in establishing important causality links.

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